CV19 - Cure worse than the disease? (Vol 5)

[rich888]

the-photographer said:

Vanden Saab said:

If you think the NHS is bad now, insisting all staff have it will result in an avalanche of retirement. Many of them refuse the Flu jab as it is so trying to force medical people to take an untested, rushed through vaccine with immunity from recourse to the usual remedies if anything goes wrong will be very hard.
It says it all when respiratory consultants openly say they will not take it and advise those they work with not to either...

Actual named people or social media comments?

Mike Yeadon, you need to listen to his podcast: https://delingpole.podbean.com/e/dr-mike-yeadon/

[Vanden Saab]

the-photographer said:

Vanden Saab said:

If you think the NHS is bad now, insisting all staff have it will result in an avalanche of retirement. Many of them refuse the Flu jab as it is so trying to force medical people to take an untested, rushed through vaccine with immunity from recourse to the usual remedies if anything goes wrong will be very hard.
It says it all when respiratory consultants openly say they will not take it and advise those they work with not to either...

Actual named people or social media comments?

You want me to name the people who said it to me? Why would that be?

[Elysium]

pneumothorax said:

BlackLabel said:

It’s sad that GPs, paramedics etc just went along with this.

I did not. But yes, many of my colleagues did, and I would have not majored in the "denied ITU" line if I was writing that article, they were simply denied appropriate care in hospital's. They were "encouraged" to quickly enter a palliative care pathway, hastily...

Agreed on the ICU part. In the beginning that essentially meant intubation and as far as I understand it, most frail 80+ people are not able to get through that.

They were denied care because the Govt chose to do so. They wanted to keep hospital capacity for the wave of healthy young people who they believed would need oxygen. That came from Ferguson’s report and the 5% of infections that he thought would need it.

In the model, that 5% equates to about 2.25 million people. That’s why they panicked and it’s why we built the Nightingales.

But they were never really used, because the 5% is a significant overestimate.

The big point is that loads of people knew this in April, but the media couldn’t see the story. It made perfect sense to do this because the virus is so deadly.

This is the first article I have seen that shows journalists are beginning to ask if it was justified. I think they are still slightly struggling with it if I am honest. The cognitive dissonance must be getting painful, but with this sort of stuff finally in the media, we can begin to wake people up.

[Elysium]

the-photographer said:

Elysium said:

Pneumothorax - you should probably read the Sunday Times tomorrow:

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/coronavirus-rat...

Truth is finally coming out.

Isn't this old news?

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/10/12/do-not...

12 October 2020

It’s been known about for months, but only now is it being properly reported on. The piece you linked to is a bit speculative. A sideline really, but this should be the story of the decade.

[Colonel Cupcake]

Alucidnation said:

loafer123 said:

Alucidnation said:

17 days.

How on earth are they going to cope without that new hairdryer.

They can buy a new hairdryer any time they want, online.

Eggsackerly.

All this bluster over a few shelves blocked off in a supermarket, of products that are easily available on the net.

Still, makes a good story for the bedwetters to lap up.

Bedwetters? Coming from someone whose bed must be like a swimming pool?

[ORD]

If history is remotely objective, the Conservative party will be out of government for decades, the NHS will be torn down and rebuilt and the MSM will have to eat itself.

But none of this will happen. There will be a huge cover up. The MSM has no interest in telling the truth because they were complicit.

[the-photographer]

Old news, with a copy of the letter from April

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-52117814

Coronavirus: GP surgery apology over 'do not resuscitate' form

Events overtook the media back then?

[the-photographer]

Vanden Saab said:

the-photographer said:

Vanden Saab said:

If you think the NHS is bad now, insisting all staff have it will result in an avalanche of retirement. Many of them refuse the Flu jab as it is so trying to force medical people to take an untested, rushed through vaccine with immunity from recourse to the usual remedies if anything goes wrong will be very hard.
It says it all when respiratory consultants openly say they will not take it and advise those they work with not to either...

Actual named people or social media comments?

You want me to name the people who said it to me? Why would that be?

No, people with their name in the media, like that Dr you named above

[the-photographer]

rich888 said:

the-photographer said:

Vanden Saab said:

If you think the NHS is bad now, insisting all staff have it will result in an avalanche of retirement. Many of them refuse the Flu jab as it is so trying to force medical people to take an untested, rushed through vaccine with immunity from recourse to the usual remedies if anything goes wrong will be very hard.
It says it all when respiratory consultants openly say they will not take it and advise those they work with not to either...

Actual named people or social media comments?

Mike Yeadon, you need to listen to his podcast: https://delingpole.podbean.com/e/dr-mike-yeadon/

There is always an alternative viewpoint,

https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/false-posit...

[rich888]

I'm sure that quite a few folks visiting this thread aren't aware of the 'The James Delingpole Podcast' in which Dr Mike Yeadon gives a very critical explanation of what is happening at the moment with regards to the dealing of Covid-19 in the UK and why he thinks the people involved should be sacked, the podcast is 1hr 48 mins so quite lengthy, but is nevertheless well worth listening to, perhaps listen to it in the car, and I really do think Boris ought to take time to listen to the comments made.

[i]Dr Mike Yeadon has a degree in biochemistry and toxicology, a research-based PhD in respiratory pharmacology, has spent over 30 years leading new medicines research in the pharmaceuticals industry, and founded his own biotech company which he sold to the world’s biggest drug company Novartis in 2017.

He talks to James about his devastating paper What SAGE has Got Wrong (https://lockdownsceptics.org/what-sage-got-wrong/) in which he says that the Covid pandemic is over, that there will be no Second Wave, that we have already achieved herd immunity and that Sir Patrick Vallance, Britain’s Chief Scientific Adviser, is a liar and that the vaccine is more or less a waste of time. He doesn’t pull his punches.[/i]

https://delingpole.podbean.com/e/dr-mike-yeadon/

You can also download the podcast along with several others at: https://www.podbean.com/site/EpisodeDownload/PBEFC...

Actual download link is: https://mcdn.podbean.com/mf/download/cwx3wc/Yeadon...

[rich888]

the-photographer said:

rich888 said:

the-photographer said:

Vanden Saab said:

If you think the NHS is bad now, insisting all staff have it will result in an avalanche of retirement. Many of them refuse the Flu jab as it is so trying to force medical people to take an untested, rushed through vaccine with immunity from recourse to the usual remedies if anything goes wrong will be very hard.
It says it all when respiratory consultants openly say they will not take it and advise those they work with not to either...

Actual named people or social media comments?

Mike Yeadon, you need to listen to his podcast: https://delingpole.podbean.com/e/dr-mike-yeadon/

There is always an alternative viewpoint,

https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/false-posit...

Of course there are alternative viewpoints but have you actually listened to the podcast, this guy knows what he is talking about.

[the-photographer]

rich888 said:

the-photographer said:

rich888 said:

the-photographer said:

Vanden Saab said:

If you think the NHS is bad now, insisting all staff have it will result in an avalanche of retirement. Many of them refuse the Flu jab as it is so trying to force medical people to take an untested, rushed through vaccine with immunity from recourse to the usual remedies if anything goes wrong will be very hard.
It says it all when respiratory consultants openly say they will not take it and advise those they work with not to either...

Actual named people or social media comments?

Mike Yeadon, you need to listen to his podcast: https://delingpole.podbean.com/e/dr-mike-yeadon/

There is always an alternative viewpoint,

https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/false-posit...

Of course there are alternative viewpoints but have you actually listened to the podcast, this guy knows what he is talking about.

I'm going to have a go at two of these things, specifically the false positive rate and the IFR. TL;DR version of this is that the false positive rate is far lower than he suggests, and the IFR is at least somewhat if not much higher than 0.2%.

Anyway I'll look at the false positive rate first. I checked his twitter page and recently he was claiming a 5% false positive rate for pillar 2 tests. The positivity rate was as low as 0.8% in August. Let's make the ridiculous assumption that somehow there was no COVID in the UK at that point, and every single one of those positives was false. That's an upper bound, looking at the ONS figures you can get an estimate as low as 0.04%, but we'll take 0.8%. From the daily updates positivity rates in recent days are 5% or higher, so unless somehow the false positive rate has magically increased at a steady rate similar to that of an exponential epidemic curve, that's a nonsense argument.

The IFR one there is less consensus on, but suffice it to say there's definitely enough evidence to disprove 0.2%. I'll use two separate methods for this. The first of these is to just look at places with high death rates. Let's take the U.S. state of New Jersey, which has a total mortality rate (not IFR) of 1846 per million (according to worldometers). That's 0.18%. Obviously not every single person can possibly have had it because of herd immunity. Once again, I'll be as generous as I possibly can here, and we'll assume that New Jersey has reached herd immunity, let's say 60% infected. Doing the maths on that you get an IFR of 0.30%. Once again, remember this is assuming herd immunity has been reached, which is unlikely to be the case since cases are rising again in New Jersey.

The second method is to use the ONS infection survey. To calculate IFR we need two values: the number of deaths and the number of infections causing those deaths. Again using worldometer, UK daily COVID deaths on a 7-day average are 163. Again, I'll be generous by assuming a shorter lag time between deaths of about two weeks. This is because using a more recent ONS survey will produce a lower estimate, since IFR = deaths/infections, and more recent surveys have more cases, which will imply a lower death rate than is likely to actually be the case. This week's survey covers the 10th to the 16th October, which is actually shorter than two weeks and is therefore even more generous. The ONS have a central estimate of 35,200 new cases per day, but again I'll use the upper confidence interval to produce a lower estimate, which is 46,600 new cases per day. Doing the maths gives (163/46,600) * 100 = 0.35%.

So to conclude, there's no evidence of a false positive rate anything like what Yeadon is claiming, unless magically our testing has got several times worse exactly in line with what you would expect from an epidemic curve, which is completely into bonkers conspiracy theory territory. As for the IFR, even bending over backwards and really stretching the numbers to create the lowest possible estimates I still get an estimate of 0.3%, and there's no way it can be lower. For the New Jersey scenario, assuming the consensus value of 20% infected would give a value of 0.9% for the IFR, and similarly for the ONS survey using last week's survey and using the central estimate would get you a value also in the range 0.5%-1.0%, which is generally the scientific consensus.

[Vanden Saab]

the-photographer said:

Vanden Saab said:

the-photographer said:

Vanden Saab said:

If you think the NHS is bad now, insisting all staff have it will result in an avalanche of retirement. Many of them refuse the Flu jab as it is so trying to force medical people to take an untested, rushed through vaccine with immunity from recourse to the usual remedies if anything goes wrong will be very hard.
It says it all when respiratory consultants openly say they will not take it and advise those they work with not to either...

Actual named people or social media comments?

You want me to name the people who said it to me? Why would that be?

No, people with their name in the media, like that Dr you named above

The consultant is a personal friend...MrsVS works with her. IMHO you would have to be mad to take the Covid vaccine unless you were at very high risk of dying of it and even then I am not so sure. Six months of testing is just not enough to know whether there will be any long term effects.

[Elysium]

Sept 2020 is Sweden’s lowest month ever for all cause mortality.

The lowest in history.

https://sebastianrushworth.com/2020/10/24/how-dead...

[voyds9]

If a two week 'firebreak' lockdown is so effective why does Scotland keep extending its lockdown.

[sl0wlane]

Here we go. Boris claiming the “measures are working to reduce the R”:

https://www.walesonline.co.uk/news/uk-news/clear-s...

Just one article, in many today.

Hopefully this is the “get out” path (claiming that measure worked and we beat the virus) and we can all go along with this charade and be done with this sooner rather than later.

I would actually go along with it too, just to end the madness... but no doubt it will whipped up to a fear frenzy before too long.

Wishful thinking I know.

[BurtonLazars]

the-photographer said:

Bunsen burners, conical flasks and an atomic orbit diagram

Are you sure you’re a photographer

[2gins]

Gromm said:

Given up uh I guess at the end of May, beginning of June. There is a scientifically proven, effective set of measures which could’ve stopped the spread of virus like they did in China, Vietnam or NZ. This, and other countries decided though not to follow the science but to invent the wheel and instead of 2-3 months of disruption we now facing years of misery. Well f done. Oh and I hope that pint, half priced meal, holiday and trip to mates/relations were really worth it.

I hope you're not suggesting further lockdown is or was needed.

It may be effective at stopping the spread of the virus but as soon as you reach your zero covid nirvana it only takes a handful of Belgians to get off the Eurostar or some Americans to fly into Heathrow and you're off again. If you can't see this, or you can and still think zero covid is a thing, you're nuts.

Meanwhile, read the recent paper by Ioannides which covers the harms of lockdown, among other helpful learning. For god's sake even the much-vaunted WHO no longer advise lockdown as a primary control measure.

[stuckmojo]

sl0wlane said:

Here we go. Boris claiming the “measures are working to reduce the R”:

https://www.walesonline.co.uk/news/uk-news/clear-s...

Just one article, in many today.

Hopefully this is the “get out” path (claiming that measure worked and we beat the virus) and we can all go along with this charade and be done with this sooner rather than later.

I would actually go along with it too, just to end the madness... but no doubt it will whipped up to a fear frenzy before too long.

Wishful thinking I know.

It's the pitch to sell the population more restrictive measures, like Wales or Scotland.

[Elysium]

the-photographer said:

I'm going to have a go at two of these things, specifically the false positive rate and the IFR. TL;DR version of this is that the false positive rate is far lower than he suggests, and the IFR is at least somewhat if not much higher than 0.2%.

Anyway I'll look at the false positive rate first. I checked his twitter page and recently he was claiming a 5% false positive rate for pillar 2 tests. The positivity rate was as low as 0.8% in August. Let's make the ridiculous assumption that somehow there was no COVID in the UK at that point, and every single one of those positives was false. That's an upper bound, looking at the ONS figures you can get an estimate as low as 0.04%, but we'll take 0.8%. From the daily updates positivity rates in recent days are 5% or higher, so unless somehow the false positive rate has magically increased at a steady rate similar to that of an exponential epidemic curve, that's a nonsense argument.

The IFR one there is less consensus on, but suffice it to say there's definitely enough evidence to disprove 0.2%. I'll use two separate methods for this. The first of these is to just look at places with high death rates. Let's take the U.S. state of New Jersey, which has a total mortality rate (not IFR) of 1846 per million (according to worldometers). That's 0.18%. Obviously not every single person can possibly have had it because of herd immunity. Once again, I'll be as generous as I possibly can here, and we'll assume that New Jersey has reached herd immunity, let's say 60% infected. Doing the maths on that you get an IFR of 0.30%. Once again, remember this is assuming herd immunity has been reached, which is unlikely to be the case since cases are rising again in New Jersey.

The second method is to use the ONS infection survey. To calculate IFR we need two values: the number of deaths and the number of infections causing those deaths. Again using worldometer, UK daily COVID deaths on a 7-day average are 163. Again, I'll be generous by assuming a shorter lag time between deaths of about two weeks. This is because using a more recent ONS survey will produce a lower estimate, since IFR = deaths/infections, and more recent surveys have more cases, which will imply a lower death rate than is likely to actually be the case. This week's survey covers the 10th to the 16th October, which is actually shorter than two weeks and is therefore even more generous. The ONS have a central estimate of 35,200 new cases per day, but again I'll use the upper confidence interval to produce a lower estimate, which is 46,600 new cases per day. Doing the maths gives (163/46,600) * 100 = 0.35%.

So to conclude, there's no evidence of a false positive rate anything like what Yeadon is claiming, unless magically our testing has got several times worse exactly in line with what you would expect from an epidemic curve, which is completely into bonkers conspiracy theory territory. As for the IFR, even bending over backwards and really stretching the numbers to create the lowest possible estimates I still get an estimate of 0.3%, and there's no way it can be lower. For the New Jersey scenario, assuming the consensus value of 20% infected would give a value of 0.9% for the IFR, and similarly for the ONS survey using last week's survey and using the central estimate would get you a value also in the range 0.5%-1.0%, which is generally the scientific consensus.

Good post.

I broadly agree with you on the IFR. I think it’s about 0.49%

However the reason it’s difficult to calculate is that it’s actually quite hard to determine who is infected. We are using positive PCR tests and the ONS estimates which are based on them, but 80%+ of the ONS positives are asymptomatic. They are people who test positive rather than people we can confidently say are infected. Are they resistant or are there other people who will never catch it or test positive?

You run into the same problem with false positives. I think it must be 0.8% as a minimum, but I’m not sure if I believe Yeadon’s view that it could be more. It’s certainly possible.

Your incredulity about the growth in cases being too consistent can be tackled. We are not following a normal epidemiological curve at this point. Growth is slow, but exponential with a steady growth rate of 4-5%

However, testing also has a steady growth rate. And the data we are being given doesn’t really help us understand if a particular area of testing is causing the issue. Yeadon believes it is specially pillar 2.

What I do think is that the Govt has not assessed the quality of the PCR test or the cycle count issue. They have no answer and want no answer because it could damage them. So they are ignoring the question, which is suspicious in itself.